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Feast or famine? 2022 was a year of plenty for carriers - what good can be expected from 2023?
This looks like our first normalised shipping year in some time, with its slack seasons and peak seasons with the usual conflicting opinions among shippers whether to buy into a long-term contract or rely on the vagaries of spot markets.
The last two years have been extraordinary - perhaps even once in a lifetime experiences - as rates rocketed beyond the stratosphere driven by with both high demand for slots, and their lack of availability, combined with industry-wide deteriorating service and increased unreliability. For shippers to have this sector-wide failure rewarded by record carrier profits was truly maddening, but somewhat cushioned by the explosive growth in ecommerce occasioned by the medical madness that gripped the planet.
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What's up with Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM moving into air cargo? Could it be an early sign of more mergers?
The one thought left after noting four major carriers moving into air freight was that if great minds were thinking alike, then there must be more to it than meets the eye.
Much of reasoning appears to hinge on this year's UN's environmental CO2 emission regulations, it was revealed in an article in Harvard Business Review.
"The impact on container shipping, the backbone of the global merchandise trade, will be substantial. A significant number of ships will not be compliant," it said. Most of these are older, smaller ships with less than 8,000 TEU capacity." Thus, perfectly good ships will be scrapped by regulators and their owners will likely be driven out of business.
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Wars, hot or cold, are quick to change concerns of what can be regarded as a clear and present danger
One thing about wars - be they hot or cold - is that combatants do not prioritise what is unrelated to the conflict. Clear and present dangers are uppermost and those perils - however dire - with distant, uncertain outcomes fall well down on the priority list.
If getting food and supplies to our friends and allies becomes vital, one can be assured that worries over CO2 emissions from ships and planes as well as LGBTQ+ sensitivities will fall by the wayside and slip into oblivion.
It also seems clear that even in the politically divided West, split between left and right, we can agree on only a few things. Hostility towards China is shared by both sides.
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Criminalising fossil fuels on land, sea and air in the carbon craze that makes life more difficult for all
The Children's Crusade of environmentalists led by Greta Thunberg and her legions of sophomoric adults who insist on having a world little different from the one demanded by Mao's Red Guards of the 1960s.
These environmentalists are the shock troops, whose aims are not taken seriously as realistic goals, but are nonetheless encouraged by grownups of the media, academic, bureaucratic complex.
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